Gavin Bryars Quotes

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.

Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist - it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance.

I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.

Adam does most of the work when it comes to videos and he basically does the same as I do with the lyrics. The videos are his visual interpretations of our music.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I've been painting and drawing and taking pictures as long as I've been writing music - and I've actually been drawing longer than I've been writing music.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

There's more to being a musician than just making music.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that.

I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.

Also, painting and animation are really solitary pursuits, so the collaborative aspects of music making and acting are pretty welcome sometimes.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.